US scientists held secret talks with Covid ‘Batwoman’ amid drive to make coronaviruses more deadly… just before pandemic
US scientists held talks with Covid ‘Batwoman’ before pandemic broke By Glen Owen • January 6, 2024
The Chinese scientist who ran controversial experiments at the laboratory suspected of triggering Covid held a secret meeting with the US government to seek backing for a project that would go on to supercharge coronaviruses – shortly before the devastating outbreak started in her native Wuhan.
The June 2017 meeting at America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) held by Shi Zhengli– known as ‘Batwoman’ because of her work on sampling and sequencing the animals’ viruses – will bolster fears of Western collusion in a Chinese cover-up after Covid resulted from a reckless laboratory experiment.
A new cache of documents, obtained by Freedom of Information campaigners and seen by The Mail on Sunday, reveal the extent to which the controversial work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was supported, and often funded, by America.
They show that US researchers seeking funding for work to engineer ‘spike proteins’ – making it easier for the bat viruses to infect human cells – misled the authorities about the risks of the experiments in order to maximise the chance of receiving grants.
The documents, obtained by US Right To Know, a non-profit public health research group, include an order made by Chinese intelligence on January 3, 2020 – two days after the world was first told about Covid – which decreed that its scientists should either share their samples with the government or destroy them ‘on the spot’.
Using the subject heading: ‘Potential visit … by our Chinese co-investigator’, Peter Daszak, the $460,000-a-year head of EcoHealth, writes: ‘Zhengli and I will do a double act, and we’ll cover the work we’re doing … as well as the broadscale surveillance of bats for novel viruses’.
Professor Zhengli became known as ‘Batwoman’ because of her virus-hunting trips to the bat caves of southern China, hundreds of miles from Wuhan, where her team collected more than 10,000 animal samples. The sequencing of Covid-19 closely matched that found in those caves.
Also invited to the meeting was Peng Zhou, an associate professor at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
After the meeting, Mr Daszak thanked the hosts by writing in an email that it was ‘nice to have a chance to introduce our collaborators to you personally’.
EcoHealth also lobbied the Pentagon for funding for Zhengli to engineer high-risk coronaviruses by synthesising spike proteins with furin cleavage sites, that had been designed to bind to human receptors more easily, at the Wuhan Institute from December 2018, a year before the Covid-19 virus emerged.
In an email, Dr Ralph Baric, a coronavirus expert at the centre of concerns over gain-of-function studies, acknowledged that US researchers would ‘freak out’ if they knew novel coronavirus engineering and testing was being done in low-security Chinese laboratories, but disguised it to make the US government more ‘comfortable’ with the plan, which was intended to help with pandemic prevention.
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Let’s not forget Charles Lieber and Harvard. Funny, Harvard is starting a crash & burn now. Do you know how much endowment they are sitting on? https://greatgameindia.com/chinese-agent-charles-lieber-his-virus-transmitters/
Personally I believe the American Clowns in the DoD weaponized a flu virus and took it to China during the military games there in 2019 & let it loose, in order to destabilize & blame China, & give a pretext for war. Clowns would rather kill us all than go broke. China is not the only country doing bio-weapon research. Please see the US labs in the Ukraine.
You are over the target.